


Intimate

by EitherOreo



Category: Carol (2015)
Genre: Erotica, F/F, F/M, Perfume, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-21 23:38:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15568896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EitherOreo/pseuds/EitherOreo
Summary: Therese still has "things" to ask Carol like why is she still wearing the perfume her ex gave her.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> If you are bothered by images of Carol's past sexual relationship with a man, this fic is not for you.

Therese wakes first, lying on her side and watching Carol sleep. She moves in closer, wishing she could insert herself into Carol’s dreams, step into the subconscious desires that might be stirring inside the sleeping woman’s head. A single strand of hair on Carol’s face drops with her breathing, sliding down a cheek before sticking in between her slightly parted lips.

Therese gets up from the bed moving slowly across the room, walking toward the bureau where a picture of Carol’s daughter, Rindy, is displayed amongst various bottles and containers, things women like Carol use every day. Therese picks up a lipstick, _Fire and Ice,_ Carol’s favorite shade. She dabs a bit of red onto her bottom lip, smoothing it out with her pinkie finger, rubbing her lips together, spreading the  color more evenly. She stares at her image in the round bureau mirror, bits of Carol's image too, behind her, sprawled out with a delicacy that makes Therese's knees buckle slightly. She focuses once again on herself, the image of youthfulness nearly overcome by endless, new desires of her heart. Naked and changed, that's how she sees herself at this moment. Is this how Carol sees her too? Naked and changed by Carol.

She sets the lipstick down, it falls into the side of a small glass bottle of perfume. The items make a quiet clinking sound on contact; Therese looks back at Carol thankful the noise hasn’t woken her. She straightens the fallen lipstick, setting it again erect beside the perfume bottle. It’s the same scent Carol’s worn as long as she’s known her: _Intimate._ Therese opens the bottle, pressing it up to her nose. How different, less like flowers it smells on the glass applicator or even her own skin the few times Carol applied it there before putting her cheek softly against Therese's hot, flushed skin.

Intimate, she’d seen the perfume ad in magazines and its promise not meant for her: _Even in the dark, he’ll know it’s YOU!_   

Carol’s ex-husband gave her the perfume years ago, before they were married, and Carol’s been wearing it ever since. _Ever since_. The words sting Therese though she would never want Carol to know. The perfume bottle, sitting among all the other special things Carol puts on her body, nearly taunts, poking at these feelings she hides. She turns the bottle so its brand name is no longer visible. She backs away from the bureau, taking a step toward the bed where she admires the body stretched out before her, a long leg partially emerges from beneath bright white bedding, smooth and firm, the leg where Therese braced herself last night. 

And in this moment, Therese wants very badly to wake the sleeping woman so she can ask her _things_. Even now, there are things she wants to know. New questions about Carol’s old life.

“Therese?” the voice muffled and sweet, a body stirring. “Will you put the coffee on?”

“Yes. Once I get dressed. He’ll be here in 30 minutes.”

“Jesus, it’s that late?”

“Take your time, I’ll get Rindy packed and ready.” Therese dresses, Carol sitting up, trying not to watch, but digesting each movement of fabric being pulled onto every inch of Therese at the foot of the bed, gradually it covers her tender nakedness that feels like home to Carol.

“Mommy” Rindy’s voice coming down the hall, small feet just missing Therese on her way to the kitchen.

“Careful, honey.” Therese touches the top of the girl’s head, her hair seeming darker today, more like her father’s. “Mommy’s up” she says from the kitchen where she pours water into a pot, the sounds of Carol and Rindy laughing fill cavities inside Therese that never contain enough of Carol’s joy. Mother and daughter run down the hall, Carol doing the chasing, a game of tag that ends with falling down in the living room, the little girl draped across her mother’s stomach. Carol out of breath, her chest rising and falling and Therese not able to look away, regarding the two of them, how the girl resembles her father in the way she squints up laughing eyes into full closure or in the tone of her skin, so unlike her mother’s, Rindy’s arms, legs and face tanned in the summer months, like now, the shade of a chestnut. When the child leans down to kiss her mother’s cheek, Therese thinks again of the father. Did he smile before moving his lips across the same places on Carol's body where Therese’s lips moved last night?

“What are you thinking, Sweetheart?” Carol asks, feeling Therese slipping from her. Getting up off the floor, Carol fixes her daughter’s tousled bangs.

“What am I thinking? Me?” Therese swallows hard, hoping it will pass, these images. Of Carol. And him.

“Who _YOU_? Darling, is there someone else here?” Carol, tickling the child again, looks around the apartment slyly, chuckling with an impishness that causes Therese to smile, equally tempered as destroyed by each of Carol’s unique responses to her. Rindy laughs too, though unsure why, her dark hair bobbing up and down, brushing against the side of her mother’s face.

“Oh. It’s nothing.” Therese says blushing.

“Hmm.” Carol hands her the child. “Something’s strange about you. Out with it.”

“Out” Rindy mimics her mother, wrapping arms too tight around Therese, pulling her hair. Her mother winks.

“Your daddy’s picking you up in twenty minutes” Carol reaches up high in a kitchen cabinet where the child’s favorite morning cereal is kept. Her breasts shift under her nightgown with Therese’s shifting eyes, her thoughts drift and she stares at a wall where shadows, forms of Carol and the child’s father are projected for her eyes only. Rindy wiggles in her arms as images of his thick, tan hands rise up, lifting Carol’s nightgown over her head, blonde hair falling against white cotton fabric that makes a rustling sound as it moves from her. Carol accommodating the shape of his body behind her, letting him help her to her knees.

“Therese, hand me a spoon, will you? Are you sure you have her?” Carol stops pouring cereal. “You look absolutely in another galaxy.”

“Sorry.” Therese pushes up the child higher on her hips and holds her more tightly.

“What’s a galacy?” Rindy, unfamiliar with the word or its pronunciation, adjusts to Therese’s new hold on her.

“It’s where Therese is right now, Baby. In space.” Carol gets a spoon from a drawer by herself.

“I’m just … Never mind. It’s nothing. Really.” Therese sets Rindy in a chair at the table avoiding eye contact with both of them.

“If you say so.” Carol places a kiss on the top of Therese’s head, it travels down her neck, back, arms, chest before lodging inside her stomach where it flips and turns much the same way Carol’s baby girl did while growing deep inside of her.

Knocks from the front door disturb the air between them. The child squeals. “Daddy’s here.”

“Christ” Carol ties her robe closed. “You’re early” she says opening the door, pushing strands of hair from her flushed face. Therese watches from inside the apartment, a witness to how the man looks at his ex-wife in sleepwear, his eyes survey her body in a quick glance that feels criminal to Therese standing in the shadows.

“Early? Am I?” He’s oblivious, staring into the room looking for his daughter. A curl from his dark hair moves into the middle of his forehead as he initiates a hug with Carol, clumsy but with one of his hands finding the top of her hip. He detects remnants of her perfume and it makes his knees feel strange, aware immediately it’s the brand he used to buy her. He remembers the perfume's name as she pulls away from him.

 _Carol?_ His whispers in the sleepy dark, stubble on his face brushing against her cheek, red marks on sensitive skin. Waking her. His desire for her singular in nature, holding down Carol’s hips gently with both hands.

“Hello Therese” he walks through the door past Carol who regards him with an indifference he’s learned to accept, his smile contrived at the disappointment finding the women still _together_. Carol backs up so she’s standing beside Therese, wrapping her arm gently around the small of the other woman’s back, taking her hand, squeezing it as she does whenever she senses Therese feeling strange and uncertain. Like now. When he’s around, Therese seeming at attention, ready to call him "Sir."

“How’s my girl?” he heads toward the table where the child is finishing her cereal. “Are you ready to come home with daddy?”

Therese squeezes back Carol’s hand feeling the strength in the bones of her fingers, a comfort in being protected by the very framework of Carol's body.

“She’s all packed and ready to go thanks to Therese.” Carol says nodding toward the child’s things waiting for him by the door.

He picks up the girl, her small fingers sink into the flesh of his thick, muscular neck. “Yay!” she says after he tells her they’ll go swimming in the lake.

“Swimming. Doesn’t _that_ sound like fun?” Carol subtly brushes a thigh into Therese and runs one finger back and forth slowly across the inside of her palm. She blushes and looks at the floor knowing Carol will have plans for them later that surely involve a certain kind of swimming: against each other's skin.

“Well” he says, gathering up the girl’s things, resigned to the new order of things “see you Monday night then.” They wave, watching father and daughter walk the length of the long hallway, Rindy holding a teddy bear and her father carrying the overnight bag.

“You all right?” Therese asks once they’re back inside.

“I’ll be fine” she says, missing her daughter even for a few nights. Carol pours the coffees. “It’s _you_ I’m worried about. Where ARE you this morning?”

Therese watches Carol stir half-and-half into the cup, intently seeing the dark brown coffee absorb the cream. “Carol?”

“Yes?”

“I want to ask you something. But, you’ll be angry with me.” Therese wraps her hands around the warm, round coffee cup. Carol expands and constricts one eyelid, Therese a captive in the rise and fall of it.

“Angry?”

Delicate fingers circle the top of the cup, Therese squirming in her chair, averting her eyes at first, then looking directly at Carol, into a night sky, a mystical place where wishes are born. “What was it like? You know? With him. Making love. Making ... Rindy.”

“Well. Then. You’re full of surprises.” Carol sets down her cup.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“No. Don’t be. It’s perfectly natural for you …” She stops, a reticence to share details seeing how Therese waits to absorb what she’s asked of Carol, leaning into the kitchen counter, braced there like she’s prepared to be hit hard in between the eyes.

“Oh Sweetheart. It’s just … different. You know?” She busies herself, filling the sink with water to clean Rindy’s cereal bowl and dishes from the night before.

“No. Carol. I don’t know.”

Carol stops, her hands in clean dishwater she’s about to make dirty. "All right" she says, hints of hardness in her eyes. "All right. I'll tell you."

 


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carol's answers.  
> The conclusion.

Therese waits for Carol on the terrace watering roses in clay planters that line the patio: reds, pinks, corals and white flowers, many withered and spent, fading indicators of summer’s approaching end. A climbing rose reaches up into the latticework of a tall trellis on the patio, its color a deep salmon pink and her nose pressed down, eyes closed, lost in the overripe, distant scent, a fruity citrus with hints of wine and pear drops. Carol’s favorite rose.

“Let me get dressed,” it’s what Carol told her just moments before, her hands in soapy water twisting a dishrag around Rindy’s cereal bowl.

“Really Carol, you don't need to answer.” Therese second-guessing the intrusiveness of her prior questions. The texture of her voice lilted, the former nerve dropped out of her and into the white-tiled kitchen floor beneath both their bare feet.

“Sweetheart, you can’t just _un-ask_ these sorts of things” a cynicism originates in the most unknowable part of Carol just beyond Therese’s reach. “Better I answer sooner rather than later” she adds, walking away slowly with hips swaying casually, everything about her metered and in opposition to the sentiment.

Leaned against the bedroom door, Carol’s mind rehearses just how she’ll reveal _things_ , lift up the covers on the past and let Therese climb into bed with her and her ex-husband. _Here, Darling, get in, there’s room for you._ She releases a deep breath she’s suppressed ever since being asked questions about love and baby making with a man. _My dear, sweet, daft girl._

She studies the room they share, the bed unmade, sheets in loose knots, reminders of pre-dawn, Carol’s nightgown pushed up above her hips, her love releasing in shudders of aching breaths, moans muffled by Therese’s hand so as not to wake the sleeping child just down the hall. She considers the nature of what Rindy might have heard coming from her parent’s bedroom: mechanical noises, a tiny factory of strained bedsprings and a headboard tapping out Morse code against a wall. Carol’s eyes wide open on occasion following cracks in the high ceiling, fissures forming in her and the sounds of him working hard, traveling to places she doesn’t easily arrive.

“Where’s a cigarette when you need one?” Muttering, she rummages, discovering a pack in one of her hiding places inside a pair of winter boots. A cigarette between her lips, she waves hands in the air to disperse evidence of it, this habit she’s trying to kick -- for Therese. Pacing at the foot of the bed she takes off her nightgown, it’s the right thing to do, changing, given she’ll be discussing what she used to do in bed … with someone else. Naked, aside from the cigarette barely clinging to the side of her mouth, she evaluates herself in the bureau mirror. Breasts dropping more these days and deeper lines around her mouth and eyes, a weariness from the road that got her here _._ Is this how Therese sees her? Changed, changed by time … and him?

His image appears, joining hers, a boyish grin, the one she was drawn to and his hands on her with an urgency she cannot match. _Carol, you smell good._ The perfectly natural _things_ a husbands asks of his wife. Positions. Later, impositions.

Dressed in plaid shorts just above her knees and a crisp white top, Carol reaches for a  lipstick, the final touch; but, her hand fumbles and knocks over items on her bureau. “Of all the … God dammit.” Ashes from her cigarette scatter into the toiletries, a stymied huff falls from her lips, a piece of her past, the perfume, resurfaces to frolic and fuck with her present. _Carol, for you._ Not yet her husband, sliding that first bottle toward her from across the table of a crowded restaurant. Her smile, the one with less lines and his dark eyes with plans to find this scent on her _in the dark._

One last drag on the cigarette and Carol Aird flushes the butt down the toilet. She walks quickly in the direction of Therese without wearing either lipstick or perfume.

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting” she sits in the chair next to Therese who plays with rose petals, plucking them one by one from the stem, a puddle of petals at her feet. “Loves me or loves me not?” a nervous twitch of Carol’s lips, an expression much like right before she told Therese she loved her, the first time.

“Loves me.” Therese says a little too easily. Carol’s eyes soften curiously at the sound of it.

“Oh, good” she says.

“You’ve been smoking again, haven’t you?” Therese’s mothering voice, the same one she uses on Rindy.

“It’s _that_ obvious is it?”

“Yes. I know all about your _hidden_ stash.” She goes back to the deflowering, petals falling through her hands, stirring up a perfume that drifts into the air that only Carol breathes.

“Aren’t you the sly one, Nancy Drew?” Carol nudges her, disarming the charged air between them. They sit in a comfortable quiet, an understanding present between them since the instant they met. Looking out over the tree-lined street beyond the patio Carol eventually makes comments about the weather.

“Yes,” Therese agrees, “the breeze does feel nice.”

“Well then” Carol clears her throat but not the craving for a hit of whiskey or another cigarette. “Sweetheart, before I begin, wherever did all of this come from? These questions of yours?”

Therese digs a toe into one of the pink petals on the patio cement, it splits in two. “Your perfume” she says too softly Carol needs her to repeat it.

“My perfume?”

“Yes. You know, _Intimate_. He gave it to you. Years ago. You’re still wearing it.”

“Oh. I see.” Carol nods.

“And, lately, I’m seeing how much Rindy’s looking like him. I mean … oh, I don’t know … it just got me thinking about you and him. _Together_.”

Carol remains silent, one leg crosses over the other, brown plaid material rises up, exposing thigh muscles, places above her knee where a man’s hand used to rest on her often in public, at dinner parties, an announcement: _This is my wife._ “Well, Darling, the perfume, it’s nothing more than a habit. Like my smoking. And, you like it, the smell of it? Don’t you?”

“Well, yes, of course. But, the name of it, Carol -- Intimate? I suppose I’m just feeling, oh, I don’t know …”

“Jealous.” Carol says it as a statement rather than a question so there’s no need for Therese to dissent. “Would you like me to stop wearing it?”

“I suppose it shouldn’t bother me.”

“I’ll throw it out and stop buying it then. That’s that.”

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“Of course I should, if it bothers you.”

“Carol?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you like it, with him I mean? You know … ?” She hides her face again, looking at a rose petal in between her fingers, the scent of roses on her hands and Carol watching how she touches the soft texture of the petal in much the way Therese strokes the soft skin up high on Carol’s leg, well above her thighs, sometimes with her fingers and her lips.

“Well then,” Carol let’s out a sputter of breath, “I guess we’re getting around to it then?” She adjusts in her seat. “Yes” she says not looking at Therese. “I did. Like it. Sometimes. In the beginning anyway. But in an altogether different way.” The color of her face mirrors one of the darkest pink petals at their feet. _The beginning:_ a bottle of champagne beside a pure white bouquet of the most expensive flowers his family could afford, roses, and some other flowers she can’t recall, the bouquet lying on the nightstand of an exclusive hotel and him unzipping the back of her wedding dress. Question marks not quite making sentences inside of her and him on the edge of one day moving against the very grain of her.

“What does it feel like, making love with a man?” Therese unsatisfied, her own experience with men limited, Carol the one who stretched and pulled her delicate tissue for the first time, tinges of blood on Carol’s robe twisted up between them that first time.

“Making love, huh?” something beyond the patio, perhaps a tree or a memory takes ahold of Carol. Therese knows to wait. She picks up a white petal. “With him,” Carol returns, “it was usually more about the _making_ than the love. Do you know what I mean?” Carol’s eyes squint.

“Yes, I think I do.” The younger woman remembering the way boys used to kiss her. Pushing kisses from her, their tongues pressed hard, not at all the way Carol does it: pulling kisses and the marvelous gushing feelings from her the way a musician pulls sound from a violin.

“What does it feel like when he’s … you know?”

“He’s what, Darling?”

“Inside.” She looks away.

“ _Christ._ Sweetheart.” Carol shifts again in her chair, memories of muscular hips against her in the early morning pushing desire repeatedly inside of her, but ultimately not penetrating deep enough to ever fully reach her heart. “Less tender. Different than …  Men express themselves differently. They're physical. That’s just how they are.” If Carol had the cigarette she craves, she'd be blowing out a wall of smoke right about now.

“Were you ever in love with him?”

“I suppose. Parts of him. He could be charming. In the beginning. Men can be, you know? But then, well, it just changed.” _This is what husbands and wives do, Carol._ His needs in the dark when her mood doesn't match his. 

“Do you remember what it was like making Rindy?”

Carol’s eyes rise. “Well, I don’t remember when … ” She looks away, embarrassed, an admission to the frequency she once performed her “wifely duties.”

“It wasn’t special, getting pregnant?”

“Well, Rindy is special, but … sometimes sex is just sex, Sweetheart.” She laughs for the briefest instant, her head rising and the distance between her and the past expanding.

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. It’s not what you wanted to hear, is it? If making babies required good sex or better yet, love, you’d have me pregnant all the time. The whole damned apartment would be run amok with children.” She winks at Therese slow, deliberate, the kind of wink that requires not just an eye, but a great amount of soul.

Carol picks up a few petals near their feet. She puts them up to her nose and breathes in things she can’t describe, _things_ that no one will ever be able to describe. Therese reaches for her hand and Carol’s head falls to the side, landing against Therese; it sends pulses, electric current down Carol’s spine spreading into every corner of her. Later, in the intimacy of their bedroom, she will express how she feels with a full, erect and throbbing heart.

***

“MOMMY!” Rindy extends her arms out to Carol while her father, in the doorway, hands her to her mother.

“Oh, I’ve missed you.” Carol twirls the child around in circles, kissing her cheeks.

“Sunshine here was a very good girl, mommy,” he takes a step out of the doorway waving to Therese who stirs pasta in a pot, Carol’s floral apron wrapped tightly around her waist.

“Such a good girl” Carol bounces Rindy against her hip.

“Mommy smells different,” the girls says, her nose against her mother's cheek. Rindy looks at her father as though he can provide an explanation.

“Do I?” a corner of Carol’s lip twists.

“It must be the spaghetti sauce,” Therese says, a playful look about her the man’s not used to seeing.

“Be a good girl. I’ll see you soon.” He moves in and kisses the child, his hand on the small of Carol’s back and her distinctly new fragrance immediately discerned. It’s not _Intimate._ He knows that.

“Goodbye.” He squeezes Carol’s arm and smiles. How happy she looks.

“Would you like to join us for dinner?” Therese says at the last moment. She stands close beside Carol, her smile sweeter than he remembers.

“No, maybe another time. But, thank you.” His grin kind but wiser, though still full of boyish desires despite deeper lines on his face too. They wave to him as he walks down the long hallway.

Therese watches Carol chase Rindy all the way to the patio, the new scent she wears seems to fill all the empty spaces of their home. The aroma not the musky scent Carol used to wear, sandalwood and cedar replaced by the smell of jasmine and roses. So many roses. Twenty-eight dozen required to create 20 ml of the Parisian parfum. _JOY._ The glass bottle placed that morning on Carol’s bureau beside several pink coral rose petals. She’ll see an ad for the perfume in the coming weeks: _There’s only one Joy._ The ad will make her smile, a whisper under her breath: " _Yes_ ," and a slow, steady beating inside her chest.

 


End file.
